Silver and Spice

The sun exploded in front of her eyes.

***

She held on to Jake, shuddering, gradually aware that he was kissing her forehead and her cheek and her throat, tender, soothing kisses. His palm stroked her hair over and over. “Shift just a little, honey,” he murmured.

She couldn’t seem to obey; she was far too content as she lay with her cheek in the hollow of his shoulder. With a smile, he reached over her and dragged his chamois shirt closer, tugging it under her to make a soft nest for her on the crushed grass. “Better?” he murmured.

“I have no idea,” she murmured back.

He smiled again. So very busy he was, stretched out next to her, taking one strand of her hair at a time and lifting it to his shoulders. It took a very long time, yet eventually the entire rest of the world was sealed out by a silvery blond curtain. “I would have waited, Anne,” he said quietly. “I would have waited as long as you wanted me to.”

Her lashes whispered down on her cheeks. He’d wanted to wait, to show her they had more than sex. She’d hurt him, she knew, when she’d said that. She’d never meant to hurt him. She opened her eyes, needing to tell him exactly what her dark prince had meant to her over the years…but not quite able to. They’d filled such a unique, such an oh-so-special niche for each other for so very long that even the word love seemed inadequate. What they had was infinitely precious to Anne, as fragile as it was real…but that was not all he was looking for. And she couldn’t hurt him again, not now. Her hand stroked his cheek, her palm soft against the afternoon beard that was already starting to roughen his skin. Her limbs felt like butter, yet her heart had already picked up an uneven beat. Despair…out of nowhere.

“You’ve certainly changed over the years,” he said casually. “At eighteen you all but asked me to make love to you, wiggling your hips around in a miniskirt…”

“I beg your pardon.” Her eyes flickered wide.

He nodded sadly. “But you’ve become inhibited, Anne. Particularly since you passed thirty. I mean, look at this…” He plucked a blade of grass from her hair, waving it in front of her nose.

She snatched the offending wisp of grass, her lips fighting the tug of a smile.

“I’m really not sure there’s any hope for you,” he said thoughtfully. He found another piece of grass and decorated the crevice between her breasts with it. Then another. “You’re a sad case. You have no interest in sex, no desire. Honey, it’s going to take a lot of work to get you back in shape…”

Her fingers curled in the hair on his chest and pulled. “So you weren’t satisfied, Mr. Rivard? You dragged me out here in the middle of nowhere to get grass stains on my bare back-”

“I was perfectly satisfied,” he assured her readily. His eyes seared hers and held them a moment. Long enough. “It’s you I was worried about,” he said quietly.

“You have no need to be worried,” she whispered.

“But I am. I am very worried.” Gently, he pushed her cheek to his chest so he could lean over her, and then he brushed off the bits of ticklish grass and earth that seemed to have molded themselves to her slender back. Three more blades of grass he found in her hair; he showed her all three of them as if he were showing off trophies. “We’re going to have to undertake a long reeducation where you’re concerned. With constant work and effort, I’m almost certain we’ll be able to rekindle some kind of sexual feelings in time…”

Anne snatched his hands before he had the chance to find any more trophies, locked them firmly around her waist and raised her parted lips to his. “Jake,” she said gravely, “maybe you could stop talking for a minute and a half and get on with the lesson.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

He shook his head, his eyes full of laughter. “I have a headache. And besides, I really don’t think you fully realize where you are. What kind of behavior is this, lying naked beneath the sun, not a mattress in sight? It’s not even night-”

A small pinch on his backside shut him up. A rain of grass on his face, and suddenly they were on their feet, and he was chasing her, a race full of laughter through the meadow with her arms flung wide, embracing the day and the sun and, shortly, the man.

***

It was midafternoon, another somnolent, Indian summer day, with a warm breeze just barely lifting the leaves in the distance. Anne stepped out of the motor home with a shallow black pan in her hands, headed toward the stream. In the last three days since she and Jake had made love in the meadow, her appearance had gone through some drastic changes, none more apparent than at the moment.

She was wearing a skirt, a typical Anne tweed, and a delicate blouse with a lace-banded collar. Which was fine, except that the blouse was hanging outside the waistband of her skirt, its sleeves carelessly rolled up to her elbows. Her legs were bare, and on her feet she wore Jake’s black boots. Her hair was coiled, but only because long, loose hair would have been constantly in her way. She had tacked the coil in place loosely with tortoiseshell combs and a few pins, but long, free strands fluttered around her face and curled under her chin in the breeze.

Jake, behind her, was laughing.

“We’ve been here three whole days, and you never once mentioned that your creek runs gold,” she scolded over her shoulder.

“I must have told you ninety-nine times. You don’t suppose you were preoccupied with other things?”

She would have told him which one of them was preoccupied, except that she nearly slipped as she neared the jumble of wet rocks near the bank of the creek. “Let’s get businesslike here,” she said absently.

“By all means.”

Gingerly, she stepped into the low, rushing stream. The clear water gurgled and danced around the ankles of the huge boots; she could feel the cold-but not the dampness-in her toes. “Ready. Now what do I do?”

He came up from behind her and stood on the creek bank. “First, give us a kiss.”

She offered her face up to the sun as he waded into the creek and planted a swift peck on the tip of her nose. Jake just looked at her with that crooked smile of his, then took the pan from her hands and crouched down on his haunches. Anne did likewise, and immediately felt a dozen intimate muscles vibrate; those intimate muscles were feeling just a little sore. A love hangover, she thought ruefully, and changed positions so that she was bending over from the waist next to him.

“Now, before I show you how to pan for gold,” Jake said gravely, “I need another kiss.”

She shook her head. “You’re getting no more kisses, you greedy man. On with it!”

“I must remind you that all you can hope for is about three-tenths of a troy ounce of gold for every ton of sand and gravel you pan. And that this stream has been worked and reworked for over a century-”

“All these irrelevant details,” she told the sky disgustedly.

“All right, all right.” He dug the pan into the streambed, brought some fine sand up from the bottom and started swirling it slowly. “It’s a question of weight. Gold will settle on the bottom because it’s heavier than sand. Did you know that any good miner names his placer deposit after a woman? That’s a fact. A deposit named for a woman will yield higher dollar value.”

“You didn’t tell me that, but I’m certainly not surprised.” She took the pan from his hands, swirling it the way he did.

“Now, don’t look for glitter-that would just be fool’s gold. You’re looking for yellow-”

She waved him back to his blanket on the grass. Jake could be a terribly distracting man. And then, he’d made merciless fun of her ever since she’d told him she intended to look for gold.

She must have chosen an unfortunate place to begin, as there was neither yellow nor glitter, just brown. Tan- brown sand. A strand of hair dropped in front of her eyes; she whipped it back.

An hour later, she’d tried four different places in the stream. Her coil of hair had come completely undone, the hot mountain sun had stolen between her breasts and was baking her, and she was laughing as she stepped